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Best way to manage contacts and build a "living" network for my young career?

4 points by creativeone ↗ HN
I've been attending numerous conferences, collecting business cards, learning about peoples new and old businesses, and there are often overlaps. I've met lawyers looking for startups, startups looking for lawyers, and etc.

What is the best way for me to save this data and make my own connections between these people?

Google contacts is overflowed with all my contacts and the "excel style" listing isnt very cooperative with pointing out relevant information. LinkedIn requires they accept my invitation.

I signed up for 37signal's Highrise, and it looks good and could work great if i go into consulting.

My "ideal" solution would allow me to enter in a new contact from their business card (maybe even scan the business card), keep and save notes, and also allow me to enter their twitter/facebook/linkedin accounts and view updates on the site as well. I'd like a field for: "Looking for"

Any recommendations?

8 comments

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creativeone
Would the basic salesforce "contact management service" be right for me? Any other recommendations?
justliving
I do have exactly the same problem/need and would add the following requirements:

1/ add history per contact: e.g. met X during event Y and talked about Z.

2/ integrate w/ my prefered mail application and other communication means (twitter/fb & co) to keep track of the interactions I had w/ the person in question.

Anybody interested in building that? I'd be more than happy to help :-)

creativeone
Being able to keep track of facebook, twitter, email interactions in one place would be great.
justliving
I guess that already exists in some way or the other (e.g. social media monitoring). The interesting bit here would be to track interactions w/ a specific person throughout different social medias.

Just my 2cts ;-)

stfu
I was once talking to a guy who had many years of consulting experience for one the big3. His opinion was somewhat that the most important aspect in consulting is to create a deeper level of connection. That the more people put an emphasis on network, the more value is in having people as clients who are truly passionated and willing to stand up. Probably depends on the business/personality but I just felt mentioning it.